Liberty

Just reading the excerpt you quote, it sounds like a misleading use of statistics to make a political point. Under bush there was the dot com bubble burst and the beginning of the credit crisis, while the 1990s ended on a huge bull market.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/greek-pm-confirms-plans-scrapped-for-bailout-referendum/article2223663/

The problem with technology is that we get used to it so fast. By the time we have something amazing, it becomes normal and nobody realizes just how amazing it is. A lot of the stuff we take for granted now would seem totally sci-fi to people from not that long ago. I'm not sure how long Moore's Law will continue, but I think we're pretty far from physical limits when it comes to making computers faster. We might need to go in different directions from what we've been doing in the past couple decades, but there's still a roadmap for that stuff.

Indeed, and by the time we're at 10nm and have 150 sixteen core processors stacked on top of each other in 3D or whatever, we might be able to use this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing To dramatically reduce energy consumption, and thus heat dissipation, allowing for much more 3D stacking and much higher clockrates.

When you can't shrink transistors anymore, you can start to stack them in 3D rather than in a 2D plane. They're already working on this.

Thanks for posting!

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200809-201107 Chrome's growth is impressive. Always dangerous to extrapolate, but it looks like it could overtake FF and then IE in the next year or two.

Found this via the SH board: http://www.tappi.org/content/events/11diss/fortin.pdf

Indeed. I would kind of have liked for them to exercise it because it would be 1.5 million fewer shares at a very attractive cost, but they can now use the money for buybacks on the market and probably still get pretty low prices (especially with days like today - speaking of which, does anyone knows how long the 'blackout' period is before earnings are released during which a company can't do buybacks?).

http://fortresspaperblog.com/fortress-paper-release-quarter-2011-earnings-3.htm

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/gmails-new-look.html

It makes sense if the puts were still in the hands of the 2 EZ Data shareholders (one of which still works for EBIX, afaik) and they prefer to stay EBIX shareholders. Technically, if they had perfect timing they could have exercised their option at 13.31, made money, and then rebought EBIX shares, but I doubt they could have bought back 1.5 million shares without moving the price up a lot, negating the option gain. But the stock didn't stay at 13 very long, and most of the rest of the time when it was below the strike price, it was still in the high 14s, not giving a big gain... Just my best guess.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ebix-announces-expiration-of-put-option-2011-11-01

Mr. Market's playing with us, as usual.

Thanks so much!

Down about -8%, but very comfortable with what I have and think they should do very well over time.

I wonder what kinds of changes he has in mind for the company, assuming that he'll keep to his MO.

I'm a couple chapters in and I quite like it so far. Very concise and insightful. (yes, I read 3-4 books in parallel -- also reading Free Capital, Steve Jobs, Money Masters of Our Time, and this)

It is, and I don't claim it explains everything, but it is one of many important aspects, IMO. I've seen it first hand.

Good points, Ericopoly. My feeling is that part of the problem is the short-term vs. long-term pain & gain. Doing hard science degrees is more painful in the short-term than many other types of degrees, but it usually gives bigger gains later. Some people can bite the bullet and work harder because they have that long-term vision, but others just look at the short-term and take the path of least resistance.

I've now read about 2/5 of the book and can already recommend it for would-be full-time individual investors who are looking for inspiration in others who have succeeded in being financially independent from just their investments. It's not so much an educational book as an inspirational one. There are good reminders of various techniques and mindsets, but most of the value comes from learning about other people's successes and mistakes.

Yeah, I can see how it can be a problem. Good point. Guess it depends if the new post is a direct continuation of a previous discussion that needs to stay in context or just a tangentially related comment.

Is it? If there's something new, it's probably best to find an existing thread - if one exists - than to start a new one so that someone who's new to the conversation can look at what has been said before in one spot rather than having to find 10 threads. IMHO.

I like what I've seen in the 10k at first glance, but it's a bit too much outside of my circle of competence to comment more than that. Do you see a moat?

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/10/27/google-maps-usage-fees-how-many-developers-will-have-to-pay/